Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/57

So the thought ran through the mind of Monique Levitan, daughter of immigrant parents who had managed to establish themselves in a successful clothing business, and who had thoroughly integrated themselves into French life and cosmopolitan manners.

A house on the quiet Avenue Republique. The floors covered with soft carpets. In the glass-paned sideboards there is the sparkle of porcelain figurines, hand-painted Japanese trays, cut crystal from Sèvres, delicately etched silver. There are tulle drapes drawn back over the wide windows, starched pieces of furniture, tastefully chosen and displayed with the and stiff and spotless. There are elegant-looking, dark-tinted utmost charm. They glow sedately, as though they are on display in a show window, without having tasted as yet the intimacy of tears or laughter. There was not the faintest trace of a domestic touch, or of familiarity. An effete respectability hovered about the place, like the ghost of a wax dummy, polished and polite in its bloodless rigidity.

Even the woman who visited the house to do the daily cleaning hardly seemed to breathe. Like a shadow, shuffling along in her slippers, when the family had left the house, she would search out, with bespectacled eyes, a concealed spot of dust. Never would her voice be raised even to a whisper; as quietly as she arrived so quietly would she depart. She hardly ever met the family. She would find her wages waiting for her on the kitchen table. And even when she failed to find it there, she would keep on attending to her work just the same.

For years her life had been tied up with the Levitans this way. There had been times when Madame Levitan had practically begged her-"Please, Norman, find some other work for yourself. I simply haven't got the money to pay you." But the old Norman refused to listen. She couldn't